Political scientist and prize-winning author Mary King is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University for Peace, whose main campus is in Costa Rica. In addition to teaching, she has served as an Academic Adviser to the Africa programme, and UPEACE has brought out eight publications co-authored or edited by her. She is also Distinguished Scholar with The American University Center for Global Peace, in Washington, DC, and a Rothermere American Institute Fellow, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
King has been a practitioner of international relations for more than 30 years-requiring personal contact with heads of state and government ministers of more than 120 developing countries. While a presidential appointee in the Carter Administration, confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she had responsibility for the Peace Corps (60 countries), VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and other national volunteer service corps programs. Since 1984, she has served as a special adviser to former president Jimmy Carter, and has worked closely with him on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As a young student, she worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the U.S. civil rights movement. She was one of what the New York Times called a "tiny handful" of white, female "heroic, unsung organizers of the Southern civil rights movement." Her book on that epochal four-year experience, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, won her a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award in 1988.
In 2002 the second edition of her book, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action, chronicling nine contemporary nonviolent struggles and originally published by UNESCO in Paris in 1999, was brought out in New Delhi by Mehta Publishers and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
Her latest book is A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008).
She has a new reference book forthcoming in 2009, The New York Times and Democratic Transitions in Eastern Europe, 1977-2005 (Washington, DC: C Q Press/Sage). It concerns the ten nation-states that were occupied by the Soviet army at the close of World War II: Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in central Europe; the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and the nonviolent revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the Balkans and Caucasus. Through the lens of The New York Times, the ideas, strategies, symbols, and methods that shaped the nonviolent revolutions in Eastern Europe emerge in what journalists like to call the "first draft" of history.
Under a grant award from the United States Institute of Peace, she is currently completing a book project, Conversion and the Mechanisms of Change in Nonviolent Action: The 1924-25 Vykom Satyagraha Case, a study of an historic nonviolent struggle against untouchability in Kerala, India, in 1924-25.
King was co-author, with Casey Hayden, of "Sex and Caste," a document published by the War Resisters League in 1966 that served as kindling for second-wave feminism. The Americanist historian Ruth Rosen in The World Split Open: How the Women's Movement Changed America calls her a central figure in starting the contemporary U.S. women(s movement.
Her doctorate in international politics is from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. In 1989, her alma mater Ohio Wesleyan University bestowed on her its highest award for distinguished achievement.
In November 2003, she was given the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award, which recognizes the promotion of Gandhian values. In receiving this prize in Mumbai (Bombay), India, she joined the ranks of such previous winners as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat of the United Kingdom, and Professor Johan Galtung of Norway.
Please visit her Web site at www.maryking.info.
Copyright © 2008-2009
Last Modified: July 14, 2009.
Webspinner:
webspinner@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)